How to survive #LifeAfterUni

March 14, 2017

There's a lot of pressure put on young people to 'get a good education' so you can go on to get a 'good' job, and when you're young and impressionable it actually sounds quite alluring. 'The world is your oyster' you're told or 'you'll go far'; then bam! You leave uni with a specific subset of skills and knowledge, no real world experience, and high expectations, only to step away from the high of graduation day with a sinking feeling of 'what next?'

As a uni student you would have spent the past 16 years or so (assuming you graduate at 21) in education, with every step neatly laid out for you. Someone tells you what to learn, how to learn it; you get help finding somewhere to live, and someone helps pay the bill (whether that's mum & dad or the student loans company) and really you have very little to worry about. Until you graduate that is, when all of this is stripped away and you are suddenly expected to become ‘adult' – you have to find somewhere to live, pay your bills and generally start taking care of yourself. All of this leads to one inevitable conclusion – you need to find a job. Easy right? You've just graduated from uni with good grades (or not), you're a nice, reliable, hard working person, so finding a job should be a breeze. Cut to six months and perhaps a few rejection letters later and the reality of #LifeAfterUni is probably starting to sink in.

At this stage either you've found a job which you don't particularly enjoy (because who really knows what they want to do at 21) or you haven't found a job at all; neither of which is ideal. At Happy Work our aim is to help avoid this exact scenario; we want to not only help graduates find jobs, but actually find jobs they might enjoy. Because let’s face, typically you will spend at least 8 hours a day at work, for five days a week, (not to mention all the time you spend talking about it to friends, family and random people you just met!) so you're far better off doing something you might like. But we're also under no illusion that just because you've found a job you enjoy, doesn't mean #LifeAfterUni is suddenly going to become a Disney movie. The truth is that sometimes things suck, and even if you land a career doing something you really like, you are going to have some rough days, meet people you don't get on with and generally have to deal with some nonsense. In our upcoming series of articles we'll be looking at a few of the typical things that everyone has to deal with once they join the world of work, and share our top tips on how to cope with it all.